The Day They Tested the Manifesto

how we handled a sexism brouhaha at MetaFilter

"I know there are limits to how much disruption any group can tolerate (I've expelled a few intolerables myself), but it doesn't mean I like it: it made me angry in that old-fashioned, anarky for ever way, before it made me sad. It's not the fault of MetaFilter, or its administrators; just what happens when people try to build towers. The ideas are marvellous, the practicalities much harder to control, and in addition something nebulous gets in the way. In Babel's case it was God; in real life, and even on the internet, it's some intractable tension between freedom and function." - jennydiski

MetaFilter Backgrounder

MetaFilter is a group weblog with somewhere between 5,000 and 70,000 members.

Stats about "sexism threads"

356 distinct commenters, 2917 comments.

"a fifth of the users who commented in metatalk between 11/16/07 and 1/23/08 contributed at least one comment into at least one of those threads. And the comments in those three threads
constitute fully one tenth of all comments in all threads over that two month period."